Warts and All
by vanillafluffy
Summary: It's bad enough that my brother's been turned into a frog. Now I have to find a princess who's willing to pucker up.... I'll give you a 20 dollar tip if you'll kiss my frog!


Warts and All

"Oh, my God, no way!" The cute blonde wrinkles her nose and tugs the bedsheet up until only her blue eyes and a mop of hair is visible. "That's disgusting!"

"But you promised, Melinda," wheedles Sam Winchester, and gives his recent conquest his best pleading puppy dog look. Doggone it, he should've gotten her to do the deed before he slept with her.

"It's _Melissa_," she says, glaring at him. "Why don't you just get dressed and get out of here, 'k? And take _that thing_ with you!"

"I'm really sorry, Melissa," he says as he fastens his jeans and tucks in his shirt. "Look, I had a really good time last night. Great time," he amends, trying to ooze sincerity, despite feeling hideously self-conscious of that thing on the nightstand. The ironic thing is, Dean could totally pull this off. "You were amazing."

"Yeah, it was pretty good," she admits with a smile in her voice, and then, seeing his hopeful look, says, "but I'm still not kissing your frog!"

Sam finds himself---and the frog---on the wrong side of her apartment door a moment later. The bullfrog has a few things to say about this state of affairs, and although he doesn't speak amphibian himself, he knows he's being read the riot act.

Waiting until the disgruntled croaking subsides, Sam looks at the frog and shrugs. "What can I say, dude? She was probably afraid you were gonna nail her with your bifurcated tongue. Or give her warts."

A very loud croak emerges from the frog in Sam's hands, and he fancies it sounds indignant.

"Yeah, Dean, you so would. Come on, let's get some breakfast and I'll try to come up with Plan B."

There's a donut shop down the street from the motel they're at, and Sam wheels in there, hoping coffee and donuts will jump-start his brain. The coffee is hot and strong, and the maple-walnut donut isn't bad, either. He feels a bit more wide-awake.

Dean inches closer to the cup. Faced with the prospect of having his brother hop in for a swim, Sam hastily pours some of the liquid into his saucer. "Be careful, it's hot," he admonishes. Dean climbs over the rim, lashes out with his tongue a couple of times, and the younger Winchester would swear he sees a wide, froggy grin.

"What in the world?" The waitress's nametag says 'Nicole', and she has a carafe of coffee in one hand. The other hand rests on her hip as she stares at her customer and his frog. She's a little older than...Melinda? Melissa?...last night's blonde, but at least she's not screaming about him bringing a frog into her nice clean coffee shop, so he decides he might as well make an attempt.

"He had a late night catching flies," Sam says, the first thing he can think of, and she laughs. "Hey, Nicole, I'll tell you what---I'll give you a $20 tip if you'll kiss my frog."

A snort of mirth is what he expects, but she looks from him to the frog and back and says, "Are you for real?"

Sam keeps a twenty in his wallet for emergencies, although having to bribe strange women to turn his brother back into a mammal wasn't a contingency he'd planned for. Live and learn, he thinks ruefully, pulling it out from behind Dean's high school graduation photo. "I'm one-hundred percent serious," he announces, holding up the bill.

Nicole sets the coffee pot down on the counter behind her, and glances around the empty room. "I wouldn't do this in a million years," she admits, "but I just had to get my car fixed, and I really need some extra cash." She gives Sam a "make-the-best-of-it" smile. "So, is he going to turn into a handsome prince, or what?"

"You might be surprised," he says, tucking the twenty under the edge of the saucer and scooping up his brother. For a frog, Dean is quite a handful. He's bigger than the palm of Sam's hand, and Sam makes a note that if this doesn't work, to keep Dean away from any French restaurants, because he's got a pair of drumsticks that would probably be gourmet delicasies.

Nicole bends forward. She casually rests her hand on the twenty as she leans toward the bullfrog perched on Sam's palm. He hears the smooch as Nicole makes contact, then she whisks the bill into her apron pocket and pulls out a 2 oz. bottle of hand sanitizer. Squirting some onto a napkin, she wipes it across her mouth, grimacing. "That'll get me half a tank of gas, anyway," she tells him. "Thanks."

Nothing's happened. The frog is still a frog, and Sam and Dean stare at each other for a moment. Then Dean hops down to the counter and back to the cooling saucer of coffee. Great. His last $20, and all Sam has to show for it is a hyper-caffeinated bullfrog.

Driving back to the motel they're registered at, Dean perched on the dashboard, Sam knows it's time to get advice from an expert, although he's not looking forward to it. Bobby is going to laugh his ass off at his one, and sure enough, that's what happens.

Sam explains about the witch they confronted yesterday---and yeah, the pail of salted holy water had worked like a charm (so to speak), but um, she'd kind of gotten off one last curse before she melted and turned Dean into...well, a frog.

Bobby whoops at that. "Knowing your brother, I reckon it's really a horny toad," their old friend says dryly.

"I got a woman to kiss him, but nothing happened," Sam says, ignoring the joke and sticking to the problem at hand. "I can't leave him like this! You know what he's doing right now? He's out at the dumpster catching flies! What am I going to do, Bobby? What kind of kissing candidates should I be looking for? Young? Pretty? What?"

"That could be kind of a problem," Bobby replies. There's still a chuckle in his voice, though. "You need a princess."

"Tell me you're joking, Bobby. We're in Arkansas---where am I supposed to find a princess?"

"Good question. I'll hit the books and see if there's anything else about breaking that particular curse."

Waiting for Dean to come back to the room---he's left a window cracked, and it's an easy hop from the pavement---Sam turns on the TV. Several missing children returned to their homes yesterday morning with strange tales of being turned into gingerbread figures. Police are investigating a local woman implicated by the children, suspecting her of abducting and drugging them, but have been unable to locate her.

Sam bites his lip as the announcer segues into the weather report. That was their witch...he knows Dean would be glad the kids were okay. Then he starts paying attention to the screen as he hears, "...and it's a beautiful afternoon to crown this year's Princess of Tyree County down at the county fairgrounds..."

There's a cat out by the dumpster, and Sam dies a thousand deaths in slow motion when he sees it's crunching on a leg bone. "Get away from him!" he yells, sprinting across the blacktop. The cat stares at the oncoming figure for a few seconds, then swiftly departs. When he gets closer, though, Sam sees the remains of a familiar red and white box, and discovers that the cat was munching on nothing more sinister than scraps of the Colonel's Original Recipe. "Dean?" he calls, looking around frantically, hoping the chicken is all the cat ate.

There's a muffled croak. When Sam investigates, there's his brother hiding between a couple of trash bags. It smells rank, and Sam makes a face. When Dean snags a fly in midair, his stomach turns. "Dude, that's gross."

Dean belches.

"Come on, Kermit, you need to take a quick swim in the sink. You've got a date with a princess."

A few minutes later, after Dean's paddled around a half-full sink and been lightly buffed with a wet washcloth, they're on their way to the fairgrounds. Smuggling in a bullfrog the size of a chihuahua requires some resourcefulness, since it's a warm June day and a jacket would be out of place. Dean refuses to be crammed into one of Sam's pockets---and Sam doesn't blame him; there really isn't room for anything that big in Sam's pants. That means balancing Dean on his head and covering him with Dad's old Cheifs ballcap.

The guy in the ticket booth doesn't give him a second look, and once they're inside, Sam removes the cap and lets Dean ride on his shoulder. "He ain't heavy, he's my brother," he mutters to the frog, who smirks. He never really thought of frogs having a lot of personality before, but then, this frog _is _Dean Winchester.

Watching from the crowd, they see the pagent. Dean croaks loudly at the contestants, which seems to be the bullfrog version of cheering. The girl who's finally crowned has wavy auburn hair and a wide smile, and she accepts the tiara as if she was born to wear it.

The trouble is, there's a mob scene around the stage. Sam can barely get within arm's length of the young woman, who's surrounded by well-wishers. The newly crowned Princess of Tyree County leans over to sip from a cup one of her courtiers is holding for her. She looks flawlessly pretty, as if her make-up has been applied by an airbrush. This vision of beauty holds a fluffy little dog to her bosom, its rhinestone collar twinkling to match the princess's tiara.

"I don't think this is gonna work," Sam says to Dean out of the corner of his mouth.

Before he can suggest following her home---or at least waiting until the crowd thins out---Dean leaps from his shoulder, over the heads of two petite would-be princesses, and smacks squarely into the kisser of the reigning royalty. She shrieks, the dog she's clinging to yips, and Sam can tell from the way her formerly flawless cosmetics have smeared, that Dean has indeed made contact with her mouth. He slips downward, and for a moment, it looks like he'll slide right down into her cleavage.

Dean jumps again---the girls squeal and scatter---and the dog wriggles free and takes off after him. It's like the cat-in-the-dumpster moment, only worse, because here people are hollering and jumping, and Sam is convinced his brother is going to be stomped flat.

Then a blur of red-gold and white zooms around the corner of the stage, yapping, and Sam bolts after it. He rounds the corner in time to see Dean give one last bounce before the pooch lands on top of him, and then someone stumbles into him. A soprano voice cries out, "Princess! Stop that!"

There's the pagent winner, her crown askew, calling the fuzzball who's trying to devour...his brother, who's face down in the dirt, being pranced on by the dog.

Dean stands up, holding the yip-o-matic in one hand, brushing off the dust of the fairground with the other, and he aims a toothy smile at the young woman. "A princess for the princess," he says, turning on the charm, and she blushes and scoops up the dog that he extends to her.

"Bad girl, Princess," she scolds, without sounding in the least as if she means if. "Thank you so much, I was afraid she'd get out into the parking lot and get run over! Sweet baby, she was protecting her mama from that nasty old frog."

"Atta girl, Princess," Dean says, grinning, and reaches out to scratch behind the little dog's ears as Sam rolls his eyes.. "I'd say she's almost as cute as you are, but you, my lady, are magnificent." His fingers glide upward from the dog's silky fur to its mistress's red-brown locks, but Her Royal Highness has other festivities to attend and merely smiles. The young woman bestows a parting peck on his cheek, looking at her fans, who are beginning to regroup around her.

"Thanks again," she says. "I'd better put my baby on her leash, before there's one less Cavalier King Charles Spaniel in Tyree County."

Dean eases a couple steps back from the crowd, until he's standing beside Sam. "Good to see you, bro'," the younger Winchester breathes.

"Back atcha, Sammy. Come on, I need some corn dogs and beer, I'm starving."

"Yeah, I guess flies aren't that filling."

"They are if you're a frog," Dean responds, and flicks his fingers behind Sam's ear, hard.

"Ow! What the hell?"

"That's for calling me Kermit. And I'll tell you something, dude---flies aren't that bad. They're crunchy...kind of like pork rinds."

Sam is bemused to see that Dean is wearing the same Metallica tee and vintage jeans that he had on when they went after Witchy-Poo, and they actually look cleaner than they did yesterday. Stranger yet, the contents of his pockets are still intact. The older Winchester buys three corn dogs and a giant cup of beer, and devours them with a blissful expression on his face.

"Good job nailing that witch. She doesn't have a sister we need to drop a house on, does she? And hey, thanks for not giving up," Dean says quietly, polishing off the last corn dog. "It was an interesting experience, but I wouldn't want to live there."

"Of course I wasn't gonna give up on you, you're my brother. I love you, Dean, warts and all." Dean looks uncomfortable at such schmoop, so Sam lightens his tone. "Bobby was right, you just needed to be kissed by a princess." He snickers. "He didn't mention four-legged princesses, though."

"You told Bobby I got turned into a frog? I'm never gonna hear the end of this, am I?" Dean burps, then swigs the last of the beer and draws a deep breath. "Bud-WEIS-er!" he belches.

"Big deal, you could do that before."

Bantering, they make their way through the fairgrounds, out to the parking lot where the Impala awaits. "Oh baby, it's so good to see you!" Dean croons. "Daddy's back."

Typical of his brother, thinks Sam, more demonstrative toward his car than his family. He ducks another swat earned when he says, "Don't worry, Dean. I wouldn't let her get...toad."

Settling into the driver's seat with a contented sigh, Dean grabs the box of cassettes and rifles through them. Sam catches sight of the label "Three Dog Night" as he slides it into the deck, and that warns him of what's in store as his brother cranks the ignition. As they cruise out of the fairgrounds, Dean is singing loudly, and Sam joins in, smiling.

"Jeremiah was a bullfrog  
Was a good friend of mine  
I never understood a single word he said  
But I helped him a-drink his wine---"

THE END.


End file.
